The primary objective of this work package is to develop and disseminate a comprehensive ontology for the nanosafety domain, encompassing nanomaterials and all information relating to their characterisation, as well as information describing relevant experimental paradigms, biological interactions, safety indications and experimental paradigms.

Description of work

The eNanoMapper project aims to provide a comprehensive database and ontology for the aggregation of research data arising from different research efforts in the nanosafety domain. Ontologies, controlled vocabularies of terminology used in a domain together with an explicit representation of the relationships between different entities, provide an effective means for the standardisation and integration, as well as the flexible scientific analysis of such data. This work package will develop an ontology that is flexible and modularly designed in order to support the full scope of relevant research in the determination and characterisation of novel ENMs, their biological interactions and activities, and a comprehensive catalogue of their safety-relevant aspects.

We aim to enable reuse of ontologies and vocabularies that have been created for ENMs already, e.g., the Nano Particle Ontology (NPO, Thomas 2011), and specialized ENM and nanotechnology vocabularies and definitions which have been the subject of work by national and international standardisation committees (ISO/TS 80004-1 vocabularies (ISO 2010; ISO 2011), UK (BSI 2011), Canada (Health Canada n.d.), USA (National NanoTechnology Initiative, www.nano.gov), EU (SCENIHR 2010), (EU 2011), (JRC 2012). We will create a modular architecture for the development of an ontology that re-uses existing efforts but seamlessly combines community-created content 31 within a single easy-to-use framework. Essential to our framework will be the ability to harness externally developed community content while at the same time ensuring ease of curation and development of eNanoMapper specific content.